Guest Editorial – Death Has Gotten in the Way

Death has gotten in the way: Pt. 1
Instilled sensitivities prevent us from questioning 9/11

by Jeff Ogrisseg
Exclusive for Challenging Scientism

Shock and awe. Watch helplessly as a thousand people die at once for reasons you can’t begin to comprehend. Repeat as necessary to produce the worst possible fears.

– Burning towers, South and North. The fireball from the South Tower was the first act of the mass flash-brainwashing that took place on Sept. 11, 2001.

Now matter what you believed happened on 9/11, the stark fact is that the world continued to watch what they understood to be untold hundreds of people dying within seconds of each other. And not just once, or even twice.

Three times, plus change, in an hour and a half. Even Hollywood can’t swing this one very often. But there it was on TV. And nobody could turn it off. Especially after the morbid imagery of suicide jumpers (the change) and a huge fireball bursting out the side of a well-known skyscraper.

– The top of the North Tower begins the first few seconds of its nearly free-fall date with the ground below. This second building collapse was the morning’s final live act.

Second for second, these were purportedly the largest mass murders ever broadcast live on television, and probably the first that didn’t involve someone in a uniform shooting at people. Folks tuned in everywhere, even on office TVs in Tokyo, mesmerized by a smoldering hole in the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York and a news anchor’s promise of updates as they come in.

The events of that autumn Tuesday in 2001 without question took a wretched toll on the minds of all the innocents who saw it in person or live on TV at levels that none of us could comprehend. What I didn’t understand then was that this was the purpose.

– Troubling imagery of suicide jumpers on 9/11, which triggered deep emotional responses in all of us by facing us with the decision of whether or not we would jump.

I went to sleep that night feeling sorrow for the victims and fairly bewildered as to what I had witnessed. I also felt the first twinges of guilt, for watching it unfold like a journalist, so busy trying to catch details that I never got around to wishing that it would stop.

Since then my sympathies have shifted to all the other people that watched it and lived. Because we have been carrying and burying 9/11 guilt for nine years – at some level we feel ashamed for continuing to watch after we saw the fireball. And, too, for some of the darker things we were thinking, or even spoke up in regret.

In fact, people feel so guilty about not preventing what happened, so deeply emotionally scarred, that the general public has come to fear that any discussion of the events could have the appearance of either disrespect to the victims or a lack of patriotism. We understand, it came straight from the President.

These days, however, guilting someone over the U.S. military’s casualties, which are the result of 9/11, gets the job done much quicker. Thus, the bar for free speech starts at around six feet under.

Programing the American Mind

Stop blaming yourself. Whether you realize it or not, you’ve been conditioned to respond in certain ways to certain stimuli. The total imagery presented was that of being an actual terrorist attack, with people dying in American cities. This was not an episode of “The Lone Gunman” or a “Die Hard” sequel. It was happening and we didn’t know the plot so we continued to watch.

Overwhelmingly, I imagine, American readers about 20 years either side of me were, like myself, educated in a way that makes talk of anything other than the Official Story of 9/11 simply unthinkable.

Embodying a neoconservative’s wet dream, we were brought up to believe in Old Glory, “America the Beautiful,” and told that ‘We proud, lucky Americans have always been the good guys.’ Sporting fantastic white hats, we’ve been doing great things and helping people of the world against evildoers for more than 200 years. We Are The Superpower. ‘And with great power comes…’

Imagine the impact that learning to read the word “astronaut” had on an impressionable 1st grader back in 1968. Nine-letter words were still pretty darn imposing at that age. We were proud from watching our big glowing rockets take American men into space, with dramatic TV commentary from Walter Cronkite.

Our American astronauts were heroes, in a long, long line of American heroes. Maybe I hadn’t yet picked up the word “awesome,” but that was We, the American People.

And later, when we walked on the moon, we planted our flag but did we take it all for ourselves? No, siree! America decided to ‘share it with all mankind.’ Yeah. Hmn? So, how swell are we now? They told us everything we needed to hear in order to instill a high national pride and it was pretty great. How could we have known any different?

The Other American Histories

Setting aside all the stuff that we weren’t taught – like how the native population was cheated almost to extinction, eugenics programs, it’s become a long list — let’s make a trip back to just a few of the now-known-to-be fallacies that they drilled into our heads about famous people and sometimes tested us on:

Christopher Columbus: The Italian explorer not only had to con the queen of Spain to fund his exploits, but also had to convince his crew to go along because they were certain they would sail off the edge of the planet. (Not! Except for the queen thing). The days when people believed Earth to be flat were long, long over; The sticky issue was whether ships of the time could take such a long ocean beating, and still carry enough food to keep the crew from eating each other before they got there. The version we were taught was written by Washington Irving. He left out more than he embellished. And he embellished a lot.

George Washington: When I was a kid we were taught that young George chopped down a cherry tree with a hatchet, and when his father asked him about it, he did the Right Thing and Told The Truth. Which was The Lesson. And The Lesson came up every time when somebody was thought to be lying. (Except this incident never happened. Neither did the silver dollar across the Potomac. Sigh…)

Abraham Lincoln: This U.S. president won the Civil War so he could free the slaves. Bazinga! Lincoln was in fact opposed to freeing the slaves because he did not want blacks integrating into White Society. What he did support was resettling the slaves, first in Liberia and later in South America. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, Lincoln said: “I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” He said much the same thing during his Inaugural Address in 1861. And Lincoln did everything he could to stop his generals from freeing slaves in the Confederate states. Laws to abolish slavery and the Emancipation Proclamation were — in Lincoln’s own words — a “military necessity.”Carefully timed and widely distributed, the Proclamation had the desired effect of “creating confusion in the South and depriving the Confederacy of much of its valuable laboring force,” according to one historian. Plus it looked good in the eyes of European powers.

You get the idea. We grew up following the shining examples that were put in front of us. Our education was so full of heroes to remember that it never occurred to us to look for more information. Finding out later that so much of it was never true means that at least half of the hours we were forced to toil with construction paper and school paste were an absolute waste. You know what I mean if you’ve ever tried to make a Pilgrim buckle hat.

– A student lies dead on the ground at Kent State University. This was the day that America really lost its innocence.

I can still remember the jolt I got from watching the local news on May 4, 1970, the reports of an antiwar demonstration that ended in 13 seconds of gunfire by National Guardsmen on the campus of Kent State University. Four dead, nine wounded, about an hour up the turnpike. Too close. I was 9, and by bedtime that day, my days of running around with fake guns playing “Army!” with my friends were over.

So I know a thing or two about shock reprogramming.

– National Guardsmen spike their rifles with bayonets on the campus of Kent State.

It took Kent State to wake up the American public to the Vietnam War, because the real stuff going on across the ocean just wasn’t horrible enough. But we were fighting Communism, so that’s what was important. Those “sacrifices” for the cause of freedom were, um, necessary?

– Life magazine brings the Vietnam War to the American public, who forgot about it until the Kent State shootings.

And how did that turn out? In the end, a few gripping moments on TV showing disposable helicopter taxis from the Embassy roof in Saigon landing on the flight deck of the USS Midway, then being swiftly pushed over the side. And Hollywood filled in the rest, to make us feel better about losing.

Americans still feel uncomfortable about admitting that it’s even possible for the guys in White Hats to not win. Or how badly. Instead only half of Vietnam being Communist, now the whole place is. Didn’t we have Right on our side? How much did we spend?

– Eddie Adams’ iconic 1968 photo of a Vietnamese general in Saigon executing a Viet Cong suspect on the street at point-blank range. It was four years later that photographer Nick Ut snapped “the other Vietnam photo” of a naked 9-year-old running from a napalm attack.

We ran away with our tail between our legs, but we’re friends now, so it’s more chic to discuss the final score. But only up to a point.

Here we are in Summer 2010, and the list of countries that the United States has attacked since 1945 could grow to, as I understand, 27, any second it seems. The number is much, much higher when you add in less direct forms of hostile action. The total possible impact of questioning the Official Story of 9/11 (as well as a bunch of other offshoot stories) grows larger every year. And who by now doesn’t have at least something invested in this?

The shootings of antiwar protesters at Kent State University did not stop the American public from taking a square look at the Vietnam quagmire, even though a large percentage of the population had been touched somehow by the conflict. Those are the Americans I grew up with.

– “Why?” Why indeed? What was it all for? And what’s it all for this time?

It’s time to stop feeling guilty about what you did or didn’t do on 9/11 and understand that it really is your duty to ask the hard questions, no matter where you live.

Liam

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Governments have to lie in order to get their populations to accept going to war. No sane and rational people would leave their jobs, family, home to travel the world to kill people unless given really compelling reasons. And those reasons come in the form or lies and propaganda and they include mythical tales of the people being on the side of the “Good guys” and the “White hats”.

The common term used these days is False Flag, where some event is conveniently blamed on an enemy that your country’s government (and likely their allies too) wanted to attack anyway, and then the lies and propaganda begin, the enemy is painted as being the worst evil since… (And then they name a commonly held, commonly accepted version of evil, like Ghengis Khan or the latest, Adolf Hitler/Nazis).

It has been going on since the time of Julius Ceasar and the Romans, which means more than two thousand years. Even the Nazi’s did it a few times. It is the only way to rile the population in to action. No hype = no war. They do it on TV in the form of advertising all the time. Slogans and catch-phrases to make you think that buying something is good, good for you, good for your family. Don’t you deserve it? Doesn’t your family deserve it? Of course they do! And you are a good person for agreeing. In the case of war, taking action, joining the team, being a good patriot, supporting the troops, loose lips sink ships… They bombard you with that endlessly so you will help them bombard the enemy endlessly.

It is unlikely you could name a war since The American Revolution, that our government didn’t lie through its teeth in order to get us to agree to fight it, to support it and to fund it.

And perhaps if you catch one administration lying you can say, hey, it’s just one and we’ve had dozens! But when you can show that pretty much every adminstration since George Washington has lied to us incessantly, after a while you’d think we’d catch on, stop and consider that the Official Story is probably a load of lies. But we don’t.

I can’r remember who said it, but I think it was Noam Chomsky. He said that Americans know their government has lied to them in the past and continues to lie to them, but that this once, on this one important event, they really want to believe that this time they are telling the truth. And they will keep on hoping that this time is the time when the government doesn’t lie to them.

I think he wrote that back during Watergate in the 1970’s. And he was right. We still hope that this time it’s the truth. Yet we know that 911 was a lie, Iraq’s WMD’s were a lie, Osama bin Laden wasn’t in Afghanistan or working with the Taliban and that he isn’t still alive but died in December 2001 from kidney failure. We know Iran doesn’t have nukes and no governments or intelligence agencies seriously believe they are building any or plan to. That doesn’t stop them. They will lie us in to Iran… But we will hope that they aren’t. We will hope that this time, they are telling us the truth.

Empires are a juggling act. You cannot have an empire without a large military. Large militaries cost insane amounts of resources, not least of which are the young minds who rather than sit in college classrooms, have to wander the globe killing people.

Empires require vast infrastructure designed solely to keep the military machine moving. Wealth is generated by the industry that crops up and grows to provide the military with everything it needs to create the empire. Today we call it the Military Industrial Complex.

Empires die because of the Human Spirit. People simply do not really want to kill other people. Some do get energized by propaganda and shout loudly their desire to kill the enemy of the day, but over time, empires disolve because nobody really wants to keep fighting them. It can last for quite some time, but as above, a lot of propaganda is needed to keep it going. Destiny worked well in ages past. Or God. Something that could be called up to serve as an explanation for why sons and fathers had to go away for years, or never come back at all, and why mothers and wives would put up with it.

When you live in a powerful empire, you are supposed to feel powerful, feel strong, feel good. You are supposed to feel better than other peoples. So when empires falter, even slightly, and the economy plunges, even slightly, if enough patriots within the empire feel the change and don’t like it, they will become less supportive of the dream of empire.

It takes a lot of work to keep the people agreeing to support something as endless as empire. Because empires are truly endless. You either are an empire, or you are not. And there is also required a certain level of ruthlessness to managing an empire. Those you conquer, no matter how primitive before your arrival, will eventually learns your ways, your technologies and believe they can do just fine on their own without your benevolent leadership. And then they will want you to leave. And when you say no, they will try and force you to leave. And then you will choose between leaving or becoming ruthless. And peoples, whether part of an empire or not, don’t like to feel they have become evil on any level. To be viewed as anything but the good guys.

Americans have had it instilled in them for two centuries that they are better than other people. Despite this “equality” we like to talk about so much, Americans do feel they are better, cooler than those from other countries. Which is interesting because such people would be very well suited to building an empire since they would not have any trouble viewing other people and other cultures as inferior to their own and in need of their help. And all the propaganda has worked for the last century.

Consider The Cold War. Russia was the new evil. We bought it. We didn’t question it. We regularly thought of ways to kill them all. Destroy them and any countries like them. And we acted and thought this way for five decades. A large chunk of our history. We justified our actions, which included such things as testing radiation out on our own population in the name of fighting Communism or trying people in public forums during the McCarthy Era. Yet condemned other countries who imprisoned or destroyed the lives of their citizenry.

I would say the last sixty years had been a grooming period, getting us ready to accept a certain amount of empire building. All empires think they will be the last. That conquering the world is some simple event that all those who have tried must have failed for some really small reason, but that “we” will get right this time and succeed where they didn’t.

When the United States engaged in empire building by invading and conquering Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines and Cuba during the Spanish-American War, we showed that we were willing to lie to conquer and expand. The war was based on the lie that the battleship Maine was attacked in Havana Harbor by Spanish-alligned forces and we lied about it in our newspapers to get the American public to accept invading. There was no discussion of conquering, because American’s don’t like to view themselves as bloodthirsty conquerors. Just an invasion. And of course occupation. Occupying a country is so different than conquering. Hitler was merely occupying France, Poland and other countries during WWII.

This empire building continued with the “anexation” of Hawaii. Another neat term which does away with the image of bloodthirsty conqueror and replaces it with the grand vision of “Exporting Democracy.” We conquered Hawaii and then lied to ourselves as to why it became ours. How do we justify today our control of Hawaii? That the Hawaiians want to be American’s? After all, why wouldn’t they? They were savages before we conquered them.

Even the Roman’s didn’t conquer everything all at once. There were long pauses between campaigns. The reason is that people get tired of conflict. It is the human spirit. We are capable of killing, but ultimately we really just want to do other things, pretty much anything other than conflict. Governments know this. And it is a fine balancing act between conquering and waiting-to-conquer-again. Because an empire has to keep going. Maintaining the empire works only for so long because the costs of maintaining are excessive. Populations get tired of being subjugated. Patriots get tired of waving the flag. That’s why you see them on overpasses, tee-shirts, credit cards. People will wave a flag, literally, only so long.

So the United States has conquered in bits and pieces. Built up the public tolerance for taking over other countries. We are a young country. The idea of being an empire for centuries if beyond our vision. We deal in decades still. Which is why the conquering of Iraq is hard to continue to accept. It feels like a century has gone by. Same with Afghanistan. We as people cannot recall all the reasons we went in there for. Like dealing with a hang over the next day, we are a bit fuzzy on those details. We don’t want to ask the hard questions. We seem to already know that what we did was probably not right. Our innocence is gone. We are no longer viewed as righteous, peace-living do-gooders. The world now sees us as conquerors. They might not have the power to stop us… yet, but we are already faced with the factors that end empires. Human spirit…and money… and patience.

We desperately wanted to believe that Abu Ghraib was just a few bad apples. Because how else would we view ourselves if told that this was government policy? That torture was now as American as hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet? The Empire would have ended then and there.

We don’t talk any more about enemy casualties. Whether civilian or military, we are not told of the death tolls of our wars. We used to be. But today such numbers are shameful and horrifying and thus kept quiet. Because it is hard to suggest you are good when you lose 1,000 people killing a 1,000,000. Empires become harder and harder to maintain as the quality and availability of communications grow. As more and more attrocities occur, keeping the gullible gullible and keeping the ignorant ignorant requires mythmaking and lying skills that are beyond human capabilities. During Roman times, slaugtering the occupants of a village in England would be simple to keep concealed from a public back in Italy. Today it would be around the world in seconds after its discovery. Coming up with credible lies to keep the public coming back for more, supporting more just can’t keep working indefinitely.

We now live in a society of the do-over. Because of the mass communications and the endless blur of news we now receive, nothing stays relevant for any lengthy period. Nobody talks about Monica Lewinsky any more. OJ Simpson is just a source of humorous jokes. Even Bush is starting to feel like ancient history. As I said, American’s can’t think in long terms such as 1,000 years. Even a century puts things so far in the past as to appear kind of bizarre to us. So on the one hand, our government is having a harder time keeping 9-11 foremost in our minds. They can try and keep repeating it, but Americans lose track and interest in things that are ten years old. Trying to keep such events as feeling recent and current is not like it was back when Pearl Harbor happened. 9-11 was a long time ago. On the other hand the government can still play to our sense of superiority. By suggesting that ending the wars would convey to the world that we were wrong, bad, not good enough, cowards, Americans can still be made to feel like they owe it to themselves and future generations to keep on fighting. This is one reason why our empire hasn’t quite collapsed. Feeling superior is addictive. Losing that feeling can crush people and empires.

Where Rome conquered in bits and pieces, stopping long enough to calm the patriots, give them time to rest up for more patriotism, America has really bitten off far more than it can chew. With over 800 military bases in something close to 150 countries, two major wars with a third in the planning stages, and probably a dozen other conflicts around the world, some we’ve been told about some that are “Black Ops”, we are stretched. The costs of the military has reached too great a percentage of our wealth and the only available jobs at home are in military industries because all of the other jobs went overseas. Some Americans have made the connection to the wars and their costs as part of the reason for our economic troubles. But whether related or not, the loss of wealth is also a loss prestige. A loss of that sense of being better than everyone else. We were a rich country. Untouchable. As we lose that, we will also lose that air of superiority. And for empires to grow and flourish, maintaining that superiority is as important as maintaining the military forces.

This is why we are still an empire, but one teetering on the brink of ellimination. We’re not there yet. Americans still for the most part think they are superior. Think that Abu Ghraib was hopefully just some bad apples. That we can’t leave because we’d look weak. We have to “stay the course”. As long as these feelings and slogans keep working as designed, our empire will continue. For how long may actually, ironically, depend on the economy. If the economy were repaired, if jobs came back, if wealth returned… We’d feel smug and superior again and we’d care less about a few million A-rabs or brown people elsewhere being killed, even tortured or slaughtered… for a while. So an improved economy could actually hurt us too. And the rest of the world. But ultimately our empire will disolve, and it will be because Americans are human and humans eventually realize that killing isn’t fun and exciting. That the neighbors start to see you as what you are. And that is when the superiority goes away and the empire along with it. We’re feeling it. We’re almost there. But not quite.

Wonderful comments – thanks Bill, and thank you Jeff, for the excellent article.

Rome was neither built nor destroyed in a day! In fact, the seeds of Rome, transmitted through the guardians of literature – the Latin speaking monks in their monasteries – kept the coals glowing, and they ignited in European civilization…

And yet, we teeter, we teeter…

What will keep the glowing coals of the best parts of the ‘founding vision’ of the country alive? How much of a national death do we have to experience before our will to live asserts itself?

There are those who say something to the effect of; There have been far worse times in the past and people always think the times they live in are as bad as it can be, different than before, that there is no coming back from this point…

People say Americans are too lazy and couldn’t possibly, today, get up and revolt against the government, over war or the economy or anything else. I think that is nonsense. If things were so bad, we might do so. But many American’s have yet to see how far we’ve sunk, or don’t want to see it. Unemployment might be high, but people still see those with jobs, cars on the road, no shortage of anything. Some are hurting, others not and the grief is not equally shared. People who have jobs are going to think it isn’t all that bad, while those who have lost theirs, who have maybe becomes 99ers think it’s worse than ever before. Not enough wealth-sector jobs have been lost for there to be a depression affecting all classes. We still see bankers living large off fat bonuses. Surely if the situation was bad we wouldn’t tolerate that, would we?

Prices have remained for the most part close to what they had been before the downturn. Meat is a little more expensive but gasoline isn’t. Yet we are paying more for nearly everything if only slightly more. That’s because demand has dropped. When demand drops, so do prices. And there are enough people not working that the demand for certain things has dropped proportionately.

The Great Depression in 1929 was unique in that perception turned in to reality and a lack of communication and a lack of understanding of the problem by the “average person” meant that few knew what to do, and acted based on what others were doing, which was panicking. Today Americans are not all that more educated about the economy then they were back in 1929, but communications are stronger. Many American’s–though fewer and fewer every day– still believe in the news and what the media tells them. If the media says things are rosy than they must be. If they say things are looking up, that investors (whoever they are) are positive, than they assume it is probably true. Such news gets out quickly today. News of problems more slowly, and filtered.

Just as Liam reminds us above, Rome wasn’t built in a day and didn’t collapse in a day. Our country may collapse financially, but it will still be here. The great question Liam touched on is in what form? Many say we are becoming a little too familiar with Fascism and Socialism. That our police are more brutal than ever before, that corporations keep their profits, but if they have losses the public pays for them, bails them out. Perhaps our police are more Fascist and brutal because the government knows a financial meltdown, and therefore a likely panic and possible revolution is inevitable. That the government is buying time to prepare for the worst. More and more we hear about government crackdowns here at home, police brutality here at home and less about our wars overseas. Is this a bad omen?

Every few decades our government behaves like this. During the time of John Adams there was the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798, which basically cracked down on criticism of the government, made immigrants less welcome, foreigners more suspect. By what we see today, not much different. Today we crack down on anyone not patriotic and fully supportive of our troops and wars. We complain about Mexican immigrants, illegal immigrants costing us money with their medical needs and welfare, questioning their loyalty to us over Mexico or wherever the immigrants come from. And we question Muslims, fear them, suspect them in every plot real or imagined.

Governments have always tried to get the population to trade rights and freedoms for safety and security. And when the people don’t go along with it, they either force new (often vague) laws with multiple interpretations to get what they want or just lie outright. And governments always try and take as much money from the people and distribute it to their political friends. There has never been a perfect economic model that never experiences deflation, depressions or recessions. No economy has ever had 100% employment.

Our country will survive. It may be broke for a time. It may not be the military superpower for much longer. We may see more jobless than today. Our empire, like all empires will not long survive. Like all empires that collapse, others will for a time detest us. The weaker we become, the more we will see and feel that as nations we subjugated and treated poorly take the opportunity to treat us poorly. The goodwill of a nation cannot long survive when that nation becomes an empire. We made the mistake of becoming one. And in doing so gave away much of what our founding fathers sought to give this country. But we have been treading on their graves for generations. I think what we thought was respect for our country had long before turned to the shock and awe. Countries becoming shocked at our behavior around the world, awed by our ability to go from so rich to so poor, so quickly. How rapidly we squandered the goodwill of the world after 911 by invading innocent countries. With the expansion of communications, people around the world are more clearly seeing that we are not benevolent, just violent. That we cannot admit mistakes, but instead “surge” ahead and “stay the course.” And that we will do anything for Israel, even wage wars we cannot afford.

Think about the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and the “stuff” our Founding Fathers left for us and see what is really left.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Really? Muslims? Mexicans?

People have a right to a speedy trial, a fair trial, a trial by jury, a jury of their peers, to be free from illegal searches and seizures. Really? No exceptions? Not even for Muslims? We want to suggest we change it for terrorists, but that brings up the next issue. Innocent until proven guilty. We treat captured people as terrorists, denying them rights, or calling them unlawful combatants, yet we haven’t established that in a court of law, with a jury of their peers. So those rights are clearly not in effect today.

Many believe that the elections are rigged, that Bush may not have been legally elected President. The Constitution clearly says that only the Congress shall have the power to create money and regulate its value, yet we have the Federal Reserve. People are not supposed to be directly taxed at different rates, yet we have the IRS and Income Tax. Unlawful.

George Washington said to beware of foreign entanglements and making unbreakable alliances where you are forced to take action even if not in the country’s best interest. Yet we do. England/UK. Israel.

Thomas Jefferson, who penned the Declaration of Independence had some of the best quotable words of advice of any Founding Father and most of his advice has been cast aside over the last sixty to a hundred years.

So really there is very little left to show that we are the country our Founding Fathers wanted us to be. Instead of a militia to protect us, we have huge standing armies. Instead of money with real value, backed by gold and silver, we have fiat currencies. We’ve squandered our wealth, both intellectual and monetary. We are quickly giving up our rights for a little imaginary security. Will we get it all back? Get the country back on track? Return to our roots after our collapse? Who can know? But we have strayed far and being an empire, we are doomed to collapse. History shows us this is inevitable. Our revolution will come either before or after, but it is likely to show itself eventually. And what we get after will depend largely on who our leaders are and what they want to accomplish. If we have great leaders like our Founding Fathers, we may do alright.

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Before there is anything and beneath everything - is mystery. As soon as you name it, you lose it. As soon as you define it, it disappears. The reality: we can't know the eternal; we can only live in a system of the gentlest ethics: Be kind to others, try to do no harm to people and the world.